Bucher: The NBA's Officiating Crisis

[Clutch20]

The problem of mistrusting officials calling games fairly with impartiality isn't going away anytime soon.

IMO, that mistrust will never go away.

Why?

There's more money at stake than what there used to be.

Escalating salaries, digging deeper into pockets to improve the team, raised expectations based on hiring the best coaches and a quality and capable staff enticed from other teams by the lure of getting yet higher salaries which is admirable but still adds $$$ to the bottom line.

Realistically speaking, I don't see any time soon, restoration of public trust and faith in the officials that are employed by the NBA. Other team sports maintain a somewhat believable amount of credibility with their referee corp. For them it helps that the focus during gametime (for the most part) is much more diffused; the platforms that their games are played on are on a bigger scale with (exception of hockey perhaps). In comparison, game action on the NBA court is more distilled and focused to the degree that an intimacy of sorts can easily be developed between fan and team individuals, witness the objects pelted onto the hardwoods during these past playoff games, the Mutombo incident earlier involving racial slurs from fan to player, just two examples of many that come to mind.

But back to the issue of escalating salaries and an ever increasing team operating budget.The jump in how much money it costs nowadays to own and operate an NBA franchise has been considerable just in the past 10 years.

The fiscal responsibility of getting a profitable return for the money invested makes for generating a lot of pressure to bear against the league for what investors and sponsors want, their desired outcome; success for that high profile player or team they've bought the rights to.

If the results are less than satifactory for Mr. Team Owner or Mr. SportsShoes, that dissatifaction makes for tons of teleconferencing conducted.
The grouch level grows.
Calls are made.
You know the drill.

The stakes are higher now, making me believe that until salaries are brought back down to a maintainable level, season tickets get cheaper as a result, sports products drop in price to reflect a more realistic price reflecting true value of that product, well, it'll never happen.

Standing tall at the fore of the horde, we have the leanest, meanest, confident and enduring franchise, the San Antonio Spurs, that buck the aforementioned trends and simply are the best in an NBA market that currently is fighting for it's credibility and it's want of a high level of professionalism that suffers from erosion by the stream of accusations made by malcontents and purveyors of stock market trends, aided and abbeted by a misguided and naive fanbase.

[diego]

at the very least nunn needs to go. as far as a change of system...

the refs are judges. they need a supreme court to ensure consistency over time. I say, form a supreme court of the best ranked officials, adopt the same mechanisms of the supreme court so no one can change them quickly, and let this supreme court "elect" the director of officials, or, let them vote on his decisions. Only way they lose authority is if a donaghy situation pops up. And for the purpose of allowing good young refs to succeed, the "supreme court" need not be comprised entirely of active officials- say 4 to 3 ratio. plus, raises, to attract more candidates for the job.

[spurster]

I actually disagree with you about the issue being officials letting too many things go. To me, the problem articulated by most fans who complain about officiating is one of consistency -- consistency within games and consistency from game-to-game. It sounds like that's something the league is striving to achieve, but at the same time, it also appears to me that the league is going about that in ways that are counterproductive to assuring confidence in the product. If you want consistency, work officials ruthlessly on the nuances of precise situations -- block/charge and such -- and insist that particular things are always called identically; if you want it to be a no-call in certain situations, instruct officials to not call it.

I don't think you get to the sort of consistency that fans want by insisting that officials call a defensive three seconds every 3rd game or by requiring officials to whistle 2 offensive fouls every night.

This is why some heads need to roll.